Free Speech Coalition Condemns Threat to Publisher of Unhinged

August 20, 2018 (New York, NY, and Washington, DC)—The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) signed a joint statement issued Friday by the National Coalition Against Censorship, affirming our core value of intellectual freedom and denouncing President Trump's attempt to intimidate by threatening legal action against Simon & Schuster, publisher of Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House by Omarosa Manigault-Newman. The coalition's statement, citing the US Supreme Court, asserts that "debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials." At the end of a week that witnessed hundreds of newspaper editorials condemning the president's efforts to vilify the press as well as the unanimous passage of a US Senate resolution on the importance of a free press, AUPresses also champions these shared commitments to freedom of speech and press, and our freedom to read and inquire.